October 22

The New Smog of content

Posted by on October 22, 2025 in Creative, Postcards from the digital frontier | Leave a comment

How proposition-less content became the mental pollution of the AI Age

There was a time when content had to mean something. When brands and writers had propositions, promises, and points of view. Now, as AI and attention economics collide, our feeds are being filled with something far more insidious: low-grade, proposition-less content – material that’s technically competent, algorithmically optimised, and emotionally vacant.

It’s not misinformation. It’s not even clickbait. It’s something worse. It’s content without consequence – words without weight – and it’s polluting the collective mental atmosphere.

The Attention Economy Has Run Out of Meaning

The attention economy began as a competition for focus. But with AI amplifying production to industrial scale, it’s mutated into a competition for presence – for simply being there. The result? Millions of posts, reels, and articles that exist only to be skipped over, not seen, not felt.

Every “Top 5 Tips” carousel. Every AI-generated “thought piece” that promises to make you a better leader, marketer, or human. Every recycled quote post that mistakes sentiment for substance. They clutter our cognitive airspace like exhaust fumes – individually harmless, collectively suffocating.

The Proposition Problem

At the heart of great communication is the proposition – a single, clear, motivating idea that gives the audience a reason to care. It’s the difference between “We sell shoes” and “Just Do It.” Between “We’re a tech company” and “Think Different.”

But AI-enabled content creation often bypasses that hard human work of defining why. It outputs surface – syntax without soul. Because it’s optimised for engagement, not enlightenment.

In this new ecosystem, propositions have been replaced by prompts, and prompts don’t persuade – they just produce.

Mental Pollution: The Invisible Cost

The environmental metaphor is apt. Like industrial smog, this flood of low-grade content doesn’t kill instantly – it dulls. It numbs the senses, erodes discernment, and makes it harder for genuinely original ideas to breathe.

We start scrolling through sludge – a haze of half-formed thoughts and derivative dopamine. Over time, the brain adapts. We mistake activity for insight, speed for substance, and familiarity for truth. That’s the real danger: mental pollution normalises mediocrity.

The Machines Are Not to Blame

AI isn’t the villain. The real problem lies with us – marketers, creators, educators – who have embraced scale over signal. We’ve confused presence with purpose. In the rush to produce “AI-assisted” everything, we’ve forgotten that clarity still matters more than quantity.

AI will happily mirror whatever it’s trained on. If we feed it noise, it will amplify noise. If we feed it thought, it will scale thought. The responsibility is human.

The Economics of Attention: Gary Vaynerchuk’s “Under-Priced” Reality

Gary Vaynerchuk once said,

“Attention is the game. More specifically, under-priced attention is the opportunity.”
— Day Trading Attention (2024)

It’s a line that captures the modern marketing mindset with startling precision – and, perhaps, the problem at its core. Let’s look at it from three angles: the strategist, the client, and the customer.

Angle 1. Gary’s Perspective – The Strategist and Opportunist

For Gary, attention is the marketplace itself. Every new format, meme, or channel is an asset to be traded. “Under-priced attention” means any medium where the engagement return still outweighs the investment – TikTok in 2020, LinkedIn in 2022, maybe short-form AI video in 2025.

There’s genius in that. He reframes marketing as arbitrage – spotting undervalued spaces before others do. But it’s also where the smog starts to form.


If attention becomes just another tradable good, meaning gets pushed aside for margin. The very act of chasing “under-priced” focus risks devaluing what that focus is for.

When attention becomes an opportunity, rather than a relationship, we turn connection into currency. (See Angle 4 below for the bottom line on this perspective.)

Angle 2. The Client’s Perspective – The Brand or Marketer

For brands, Gary’s quote reads like a call to arms: find the next underpriced channel before your rivals do.

It’s smart. It encourages data-driven efficiency and smarter ROI thinking. But it can also breed a kind of platform opportunism – hopping from TikTok to Threads to the next shiny thing, chasing soft numbers (likes generally don’t pay your bills) instead of narratives.

If every piece of content is just an attempt to buy attention cheaper, then proposition, purpose, and story collapse under the weight of tactical urgency.

True brand leadership doesn’t chase under-priced attention; it earns sustained attention by standing for something. The cumulative effect is last preference rather than the development of indifference.

Angle 3. The Customer’s Perspective – The Human in the Scroll

From the audience’s side, Gary’s quote exposes a truth they can already feel: their attention has become the product. Every pause, tap, and scroll is data to be traded. Every second of focus is monetised.

No wonder people feel digitally exhausted. They’re not participants – they’re inventory. As Yanis Varoufakis warns, the new techno-feudal overlords are turning citizens into indentured attention slaves – trapped in systems that extract focus, emotions, and time for the enrichment of algorithms they do not own.

The fair exchange of attention happens when the content gives something back: entertainment, insight, or emotional lift. Otherwise, it’s just more noise in the smog.

As AI-driven personalisation deepens, customers will begin to demand attention autonomy – tools that defend their focus and filter for meaning. The age of Attention Detox is coming. It begins with the add-blocking trend:

Angle 4. The Integrated View – From Arbitrage to Ethics

Gary’s statement is strategically potent but morally precarious. It reminds us that while attention is currency, human focus is not infinite – and neither is trust.

In A Quiet Stroll Down Wall Street, Burton Malkiel revealed that constant trading is often a con played on emotional investors – activity masquerading as intelligence – while the real wealth is created quietly by those like Warren Buffett who invest in people, patience, and service.

The same is true of marketing: most of the day-trading of attention rewards the platform, not the participant.

LensStrategic ValueRisk / LimitationGuiding Principle
GaryInnovation, first-mover advantageShallow engagement, burnout economicsTreat attention as currency – but respect the spender
ClientROI efficiency, agilityFragmented brand story, short-termismBalance attention with intention
CustomerRelevance, empowermentExploitation, fatigueValue for value – attention must be earned, not taken

Towards a Cleaner Creative Air

We need a new environmentalism of attention – a conscious effort to protect the mental ecosystem from overproduction and under-thinking.

That starts with three simple shifts:

  1. Propose, don’t just post.
    Every piece of content should have a point, a tension, or a truth worth sharing. If it doesn’t, it’s litter.
  2. Slow down the scroll-fodder.
    Depth beats velocity. Think like a craftsman, not a content farm.
  3. Be accountable for cognitive impact.
    If your content leaves the audience no smarter, kinder, or more curious than before, you’ve added to the pollution.

Rage Against the Machine Learning

We’re entering an age where the world will run on generated words. But not all words are created equal.

The marketers, writers, and leaders who thrive in this new landscape will be those who can still think slowly in a fast world – those who resist the urge to fill the silence with something, anything, just to stay visible. Just because you have a content calendar, doesn’t mean you have to bow to the deadline.

Because the future doesn’t belong to the ones who post most… respect to Gary (I wish I had a fraction of his communication chutzpa) and his view. It belongs to the ones who still have something to say. I am still a fan of vloggers/short film makers like Casey Neistat who get the balance right for clients, consumer and clients on the infotainment game.

Empaths, Imagineers, and the Return of the Brief

If AI is teaching us anything, it’s that creativity is not about volume – it’s about vision. The role of the empath and the imagineer has never been more vital: to restore meaning to the medium, to feel before they formulate, and to insist that every idea begins with intent.

Perhaps it’s time we bring back the creative brief – not as a document, but as a discipline. A pause before production. A moment to ask the only question that really matters:

“What are we trying to say – and why should anyone care?” In the end, that’s how we clear the air

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